Animation Students Turn Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” into Kaleidoscope of Styles

Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” music video has over 800 MILLION views on YouTube. That’s a lot! You’ve probably contributed your part to that massive number, which is why you’re here. Watch all those ballet dancers and butts in a whole new light thanks to the magic of rotoscoping!

Animation students at the University of Newcastle were given the task of transforming TSwift’s iconic video. 49 students were each given 52 frames (about three seconds) of footage and told to go wild. The result is 2767 frames of hand-crafted animation. The wide variety of styles turns an already exuberant video into a kaleidoscope of color. (We especially like the underwater dancing banana thing.)

For those curious, rotoscoping is the technique by which animators trace over individual frames of video to create an animated replica of the original footage.